I've heard my friends say that kindergarten graduation
parties turn them to mush. I'm afraid, I'm not much of a
public weeper. I don't even pack hankies in my purse, but
this year I left the ceremony moved to tears.
The celebration started late. I tried to second guess the
powers that be and even showed up ten minutes past the time
stated on the invitation in hopes of staving off the
inevitable wait. After photographing the graduate and
exchanging hellos with the teachers and the other mothers, I
parked myself on a low chair designed for a kindergartner,
hoping the festivities would begin at last.
Another woman sat down next to me. Tall, with a creamy
complexion, pale blue eyes, and a blonde wig, Leah was even
more squashed into her tiny chair than I was into mine.
Despite this, she managed to give off the aura of seeming
comfortable while I was growing increasingly annoyed. It was
twenty minutes late and nothing had started yet.
Although her Hebrew was nearly perfect, Leah was not a native
Israeli. She had immigrated from the former USSR over a
decade earlier. As we sat side by side in a rare idle moment,
I tried to imagine her as a little Russian girl with a large
white bow in her flaxen hair and a red Komsomol bandana
around her neck.
"How did you end up here?" I asked. I didn't mean to be
nosey, but as I daydreamed about the life Leah must have led
before her aliya, the question just burst out of me.
From her answer I sensed that she didn't regard my query as
intrusive. On the contrary, she welcomed it.
"We lived in Moscow," she recalled. "We were quite
comfortable. My husband was a lecturer at a university and I
worked as an editor in a publishing house.We wanted to leave
but we wanted to go to America. All our relatives had gone
there and we wanted to join them.
"We applied for visas and time and time again our requests
were refused. Then one night, I was at home watching
television and a picture of Jerusalem flashed across the
screen. I started to cry and for two hours I just cried and
cried. I didn't know why, but afterwards, I told my husband
that we were going to Israel.
"Neither of us had any family here and we knew that jobs
would be hard to come by, but he agreed. We came on
aliya soon after that. After that came a rapid
immersion into religious life."
"We felt Hashem holding our hands," Leah recalled.
At that point, I could hear accordion chords. The children
took their places in the center of the classroom, wearing
gold oak tag crows cut out in the shape of Torah scrolls.
Then they started singing 'Torah Tziva Lanu . . .
.'
As we watched our little boys sing those words so naturally,
so effortlessly, I thought of Leah weeping in front of her
television set in Moscow. All of a sudden, my eyes began to
well up with tears. Everyone else seemed calm and
unemotional. I drew my camera up close to my face to hide the
fact that I was crying. I glanced at Leah. Look where her
tears had taken her — across continents and back into a
way of life unknown by her family for almost a century.
I looked at our sons, her blonde Yosef and my dark Yosef,
saplings in a garden of Torah watered with mothers' tears. As
uncomfortable as I was about crying in public, I was glad
that the emotion was there. It would sustain me and hopefully
also my son.
And in time, I would learn to display it more openly.
Maybe I'll even pack tissues for the next graduation.
